Whitechapel - A question about space travelTue, 03 Mar 2015 14:32:54 -0600http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/
Lussumo Vanilla 1.1.4 & Feed Publisher
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346270#Comment_346270
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346270#Comment_346270Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:20:01 -0600mjmartinejohnI'm looking for ideas more than anything...theoretical or practical ideas. Once again, it is not a huge plot point, but it is something that I would like to have an idea about.

Notice that the distance scale goes up by a factor of 1,000 after the first step, and then by 1,000,000 for each of the next two steps.

Interplanetary travel is the only stage of which we have any experience, and it's still a wide open frontier. Current technologies include chemical rockets, ion engines, and electric propulsion. Solar sails have, I believe, been tested in Earth orbit with mild success, but not for interplanetary missions. (Wiki also has a section on Hypothetical propulsion methods.) Power sources are solar out to about Jupiter, and radio-thermal generators thereafter (basically, generating a tiny bit electricity from radioactive decay, far less than from fission or fusion)

Interstellar travel could use any of those methods assuming you have several hundred thousand years to get there. Radical propulsion techniques include the ever-popular Lots And Lots Of Atomic Bombs Method which has been speculated to be able to deliver a probe to Barnard's star (6ly) within a human lifetime, which I suppose would be nuclear fusion. And also things like lightsails driven by lasers or masers, which require planetary-scale power sources, I think.

Intergalactic travel (which, let's remember, is on a scale 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) times larger than terrestrial journeys) is so beyond what's possible that there is effectively no "reality" to it at all: Getting to the closest galaxy in anything under 2.5 million light years requires breaking known physics (because that's how long it takes at the speed of light). I suppose you could do some stellar engineering to slingshot a small sun out of the galaxy, but the fastest moving star (relative to the sun) is only going at about 1000km/s, and so would take about 750 trillion years to reach Andromeda.

Other than that, if you're going to invent physics anyway (a noble tradition), you could just create a method of warping space or creating wormholes, and define it to have as large or small a power demand as you want. It could run on the heat from a cup of tea. ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346276#Comment_346276
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346276#Comment_346276Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:27:45 -0600mjmartinejohn
ten different versions of space travel, from the practical to the downright outrageous. I am thinking that interplanetary travel might be the way to go with this story, something in our solar system, to maintain the idea that this is somewhat realistic.

Thanks @256 for your info. Lots and lots of atomic bombs method.:) ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346295#Comment_346295
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346295#Comment_346295Fri, 04 Jan 2013 06:00:18 -0600OddcultA question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346302#Comment_346302
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346302#Comment_346302Fri, 04 Jan 2013 10:09:19 -0600Peter Kelly
One of the coolest was a theory that Faster Then Light travel could be achieved if spaced had been "pre-warped"

Effectively, a slower then light speed ship would warp space akin to laying train tracks, then FTL speeds could be achieved by different ships using those tracks of warped space. ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346303#Comment_346303
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346303#Comment_346303Fri, 04 Jan 2013 10:14:26 -0600Slick
A warp drive is a theoretical possibility ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346348#Comment_346348
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346348#Comment_346348Sat, 05 Jan 2013 06:13:07 -0600Ben Klumaster
site for people writing sci-fi stories and wanted some scientific accuracy / reference to other authors' handwaves. They have a fairly extensive page on FTL. ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346371#Comment_346371
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346371#Comment_346371Sat, 05 Jan 2013 14:53:32 -0600Magnulus
Inhabitat link ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346389#Comment_346389
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346389#Comment_346389Sun, 06 Jan 2013 05:11:11 -0600SlickA question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346401#Comment_346401
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346401#Comment_346401Sun, 06 Jan 2013 08:35:34 -0600Jason A. QuestEven if you limit the setting to interplanetary travel, it's important to keep the scale intact. If it takes hours to get to the Moon from Earth, it'd take weeks to get to Mars. If they can get from Earth to Saturn in a matter of hours, then they've probably also started interstellar (many-year) travel, because they're already up to a large fraction of the speed of light. ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346403#Comment_346403
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346403#Comment_346403Sun, 06 Jan 2013 10:12:35 -0600StefanJhttp://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/crossindex.php ]]>
A question about space travelhttp://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346405#Comment_346405
http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10953&Focus=346405#Comment_346405Sun, 06 Jan 2013 11:10:33 -0600256
unnecessary for anything to be from another galaxy.

I guess it's because most people - including quite a lot of people interested writing in science fiction - don't have a good handle on the relative sizes and distances of the cosmos. It is understandable, though, because even when you know the numbers (cf. my first post) it's hard to get an intuitive feel for things that involve such large numbers. ]]>